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Three Advantages of Malpractice Reform

A liability-by-contract system along the lines I have discussed in recent blog posts and in my book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, would have a number of compelling advantages. Here are three:

Insurers rather than patients would become the primary monitors of healthcare quality

Under this proposal, a great deal of quality information—currently unavailable—would now be provided to patients. However, patients would not be the primary monitors of quality. That role would fall to insurers. If doctors could escape the costs and burdens of the liability system by compensating patients for unexpected outcomes, they would naturally want to insure against such payments.

So instead of buying malpractice insurance, they would be purchasing what amounts to episode-specific insurance on all patients, say, undergoing surgery.

In the current system, there are no life and disability insurance products specifically tied to episodes of medical care. However, if the contract system becomes widely used, such products are likely to emerge.

As noted previously, under the current system, there is very little relationship between actual malpractice and malpractice lawsuits. As a result, malpractice premiums do not reflect the likelihood that doctors will commit malpractice. Instead, premiums reflect the likelihood that doctors will be sued. Under the liability-by-contract system, however, compensation would be based on objective phenomenon, that is, death and disability. In pricing these policies, insurers would have a strong interest in monitoring how doctors practice medicine. The market, rather than bureaucratic bodies, would determine who is a good surgeon and who is a bad one, and those determinations would be reflected in insurance premiums.

In addition to the fact that malpractice premiums are not closely related to the actual incidence of malpractice, premiums charged to doctors rarely reflect the quality of medicine being practiced. In the reformed system, insurance premiums should be closely related to actual outcomes. Surgeons with high mortality rates will pay higher premiums to insure against unexpected outcomes, other things being equal. These higher premiums, in turn, will constitute a strong financial incentive to find safer ways to perform surgery.

Multiple parties on the medical side would have strong incentives to cooperate in improving quality

Under the current system, a patient undergoing surgery typically is not dealing with a single doctor who is responsible for the entire procedure. Instead, the patient is (implicitly) contracting with several doctors, each as an independent contractor. For example, there is the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the radiologist, the pathologist, and the hospital itself. Because each of these entities is independent of the other, none bears the full cost of his or her bad behavior, and none reaps the full benefits of good behavior.

Some have proposed making the hospital fully responsible for all malpractice claims, but that doesn’t work very well when none of the other parties to the medical incident are hospital employees. Under the proposal envisioned here, all parties to a surgical event, for instance, would have strong incentives to contract with each other and cooperate with each other on error-reducing, quality-improving changes (including electronic medical records and hospital infection reduction procedures). The incentives would be to avoid the current tort system, to offer the patient a contract insured by a single insurer and to minimize the cost of that insurance.